Choice Chamber: Next Phase in the “TwitchPlays” Saga or Start of a New Genre?

Coming to your PC this winter (if all goes according to schedule), Choice Chamber is an indie game brought to you by Studio Bean. Designed to be played while streaming, this 2D platformer places the fate of your character in the hands of the viewers. Text will pop up on in a window asking questions like What weapon shall we bless our hero with? or With what element shall we bless our hero? The answers will be shown below the question—one word answers like Hammer, Bow, or Sword. It is the viewer’s job to vote in the poll, then watch the results come in live to the stream. The winning answer will be implemented in the current game. If you are not a streamer, however, do not worry. The game has an Offline Mode which will use RNG to decide what will behold the player.

One might think that this is merely a follow-up to the TwitchPlaysPokemon (TPP) hype, but the Kickstarter for Choice Chamber was up two weeks before TPP was introduced to the world. After seeing the success of TPP, however, Twitch decided that there is great potential in chat-inclusive games. On April 16th, Twitch announced that they would meet all funding on the Kickstarter project, as well as help support Twitch chat integration. Thanks to this boost in funding, Studio Bean met its goal of $35,000. After Twitch announced their backing of the game, they also scheduled for several notable streamers to have a promoted session with an early alpha version of the stream. With alpha access being one of the donor gifts, private alpha will see an increase of streamers Choice Chamber, as well as the Twitch promoted streams such as Towelliee and Lethalfrag.

As Studio Bean continues to work towards the goal of public release in December 2014, how do you think the game will succeed? Are we looking at the next ground-breaking game, or will this just be another game added to gamers’ backlogs? According to most, 2014 is the year of the MMO. Will Choice Chamber usher in 2015, the Year of the Indie Games? What other games do you have on your radar that you think should get more publicity? Share your thoughts!

I’ve watched Ducksauce play this a few times, and it’s great; all it takes it one idea to sway the chat from helping the streamer to destroying them, which keeps the game’s flow very interesting. If the chat turns against them often though, I can see some streamers getting very angry at this.

I agree with you on the server lag Halios, but I don’t think that Choice Chamber would cause that much lag on the servers. The original TPP had over 100k viewers, and not many streamers have been able to produce that kind of levels of views.